i879*J Scientific Materialism and Ultimate Conceptions. 661 
II. SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM AND ULTIMATE 
CONCEPTIONS * 
NDER the above title Mr. Sidney Billing has issued a 
work which even those who dissent most widely from 
the author’s views will find, we think, worthy of a 
careful examination. Its main features are a vigorous 
critique of scientific materialism as expressed more or less 
overtly in many works and speeches of the present day, 
and especially in the famous “ Belfast Address ” and 
“ Birmingham Oration ” of Prof. Tyndall ; a protest against 
the license of so-called “ scientific imagination ” and against 
the dogmatic intolerance — shall we say of official science ? 
Lastly, the author calls in question the received theory of 
heat as a molecular and ethereal vibration, and suggests 
that it should be regarded as a substantive entity, “ the 
primordial unity out of which matter arose,” the principle 
of all terrestrial phenomena, but itself a product of intelli- 
gence. These three questions are not discussed separately 
and seriatim, but are interwoven together, and accompanied 
by utterances and reflections on a great variety of subjects, 
which, if not always strictly relevant to the main issues, are 
often highly original and suggestive. As an instance we 
extract the following note : — “ The red-skin hunter hoped 
to be translated to a region abounding in game. The Maori 
believed that life after death is a series of skirmishes in 
which the blessed are always victorious. The Teuton of old 
nourished the same hope. Civilisation cramps such aspira- 
tions. Would the cotton-weaver be content to labour for 
ever in cotton-mills, even though they were miles upon 
miles in length ?” 
Mr. Billing brings to his task an amount of erudition 
which we must pronounce wonderful. He has read and has 
at command not merely scientific and quasi-scientific, but 
non-scientific and even anti-scientific, works. Carlyle, 
Fichte, Bruno, Spinoza, Lucretius, Hume, Cousin, Rad- 
cliffe, and Noah Porter are as familiar to him as Humboldt, 
Liebig, Kekule, Helmholtz, Darwin, Du Bois-Reymond, or 
the “ Bridgwater Treatises.” We find, however, no sign 
that he is an experimentalist or observer in any branch of 
* Scientific Materialism and Ultimate Conceptions, by Sidney Billing. 
London : Bickers and Son. 
